More information for potential members of the board of directors of
CTA-Metro-NY.org
Why stay in the Church?
After all it is anti-gay (they are disordered); anti-women (they aren’t qualified to be priests); sex outside of marriage is not permitted; birth control is forbidden; and it continues to turn away from the victims of priest and religious predators in the Church. It is a good and fair question when the Church seems so out of touch with the message of love and justice of Jesus as the Way, the Truth and the Life. The Second Vatican Council made it clear that the Laity are the Church, but the hierarchy of the church have hijacked the Church and put it in danger with their self serving, absolute power and control systems generally excluding the laity from any meaningful participation in the leadership of the Church.
Conscientious Objectors
Call to Action Metro NY welcomes those who go to Church and those who don’t (aka the unchurched). We can feel excluded from a club that has so many rules that we don’t believe in. What’s the point? We can feel pushed out from our home that formed us in all that we believe in in terms of Jesus message of love and justice, such as, gay rights, woman priests, a healthy science based attitude toward human sexuality. Many Catholic theologians believe and have taught that the Church gives supremacy to our individual consciences when it comes to these doctrines. So many of us have become Conscientious Objectors to these defective doctrines not unlike Galileo who was nearly burned at the stake for his heresy that the Sun was the center of the solar system. It is our baptism that makes us irrevocably Catholic and that cannot be taken away by derogatory characterizations such as cafeteria Catholics. Nearly 90% of Catholics do not follow the church’s teaching on birth control.
Our Agenda
We are committed to the peace and justice agenda called for by our baptism. We function within the atmosphere of ambiguity of our beliefs and being Catholic in a Church strangled by the clericalism James Carroll describes in his book, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie, How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul. We are currently in conversation with members of the German Synodal Way to understand how they search for a new way with their radical vision of a church without clericalism and exclusions. Our organization spent more than five years working with many other organizations and survivors of childhood sexual abuse to bring civil authority and accountability to the among others, the Catholic Church in New York State. The Child Victim Act was signed into law in 2018. In addition to working with the German Synodal Way we read together Michelle Alexander’s book on the travesty of the criminal justice system for people of color in the USA, which has resulted in mass incarceration. We are committed to work for change in the criminal justice area as one of our priorities and recently supported the HALT bill which reformed the NYS system of torture in solitary confinement and was signed into law in April 2021.
For more information an/or to talk with one of the board members email us at ctametrony@gmail.com